Grove Hill Productions/Sony Pictures Classics
Michael Shannon is a man with apocalyptic visions and Tova Stewart is his deaf daughter in "Take Shelter."
Sometimes it seems as if the movies are telling a story that changes slightly as it is passed from film to film, as in a game of "whispers" or "telephone," in which a message is relayed from one person to another, with results that are amusing or alarming.
In Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," the camera witnessed with awe the startling midair flight patterns of large flocks of birds. In today's movie, "Take Shelter," those patterns become impossible, surreal, and the birds drop from the air, dead, like feathery hailstones. The birds continue to fall in the upcoming "Melancholia," when a new planet appears in the sky, a menacing globe that had been hiding behind the sun -- a phenomenon that earlier this year motivated "Another Earth."
Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.
Rating: R for some language
Length: 120 minutes
Released: September 30, 2011 NY/LA
Cast: Michael Shannon, Katy Mixon, Shea Whigham, Jessica Chastain, Kathy Baker
Director: Jeff Nichols
Writer: Jeff Nichols
"Take Shelter" is a movie born from the atmospheric pressure of the national mood, from the sense that danger is lurking around every corner, and disaster is imminent. (Even the adults in "Footloose" are compelled by such convictions.) The lead actor is Michael Shannon, an appropriate choice: As anyone familiar with Shannon from past films or from his role as the repressed Prohibition agent on "Boardwalk Empire" will know, he is a human storm front -- a brooding, intense, dangerous presence that occasionally thunders and explodes. He has the large eyes of a nocturnal creature that needs to see in the dark, and his distinctive features might have been sculpted by Jack Pierce, creator of Universal's Frankenstein monster, a creature born of lightning.
His wife is played here by Jessica Chastain, a beautiful woman, but "Take Shelter" makes her a topographical match for Shannon: The camera emphasizes her broad, flat brow, the slope of her nose, the escarpment of her cheekbones and the cleft in her chin.
Shannon is Curtis LaForche, a hard-working drill-rig crewman in rural Ohio who enjoys what his envious best friend ("Boardwalk Empire" co-star Shea Whigham) identifies as "a good life." Curtis loves his wife, Sam (Chastain), and young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf. Hannah is learning to communicate with her parents in sign language, and the idea of signs and codes becomes significant when Curtis begins experiencing apocalyptic nightmares, most of which contain visions of deadly storms heralded by thick rain, "like fresh motor oil."
Is Curtis going insane, like his schizophrenic mother (Kathy Baker), or are these dreams prophecies to be deciphered? Increasingly anxious and irritable, Curtis risks his marriage and his job when he becomes obsessed with the old underground tornado shelter in the backyard of his modest ranch home, on the edge of a large open field, where the border between civilization and wilderness is marked only by the height of the grass. "I'm afraid something might be coming," Curtis warns. "Something that's -- not right."
"Take Shelter" is written and directed by Jeff Nichols, who was born and raised in Little Rock. (He is the brother of Memphis musician and Lucero member Ben Nichols, who contributes the closing-credits song.) Nichols' previous -- and first -- feature was 2007's "Shotgun Stories," a sort of Arkansas backroads update of John Ford's "My Darling Clementine." That movie was produced by Nichols' very successful North Carolina School of the Arts classmate, director David Gordon Green ("George Washington," "Pineapple Express"), but it never received a Memphis theatrical screening, so "Take Shelter" may represent an introduction to Nichols for most local moviegoers.
It's quite an introduction: The new movie fulfills the promise of the first, and immediately establishes Nichols as a major American director, even if the film's open ending is a bit of a letdown -- more noncommittal than ambiguous, and too easy to anticipate. Other than this, "Shelter" -- like "Shotgun," which also starred Shannon -- gets all the details right. Most impressive is its convincing and sympathetic recognition of the economic pressures that are an extremely important part of most people's lives but are ignored by most filmmakers. In "Take Shelter," Curtis' money woes accumulate like storm clouds -- like the counters on a gas pump, which click past $50, in close-up, as Curtis fills his pickup truck. Health insurance is a major issue, too. I don't know if I've ever before heard this line in a movie, but I've heard it a million times in the world outside the cinema: "What's the co-pay?"
"Take Shelter" is at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss: (901) 529-2394
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